The center of attention

Published: Friday, August 23, 2013 at 03:21 PM.

“Do you want to be?” someone on the panel asked in return with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

“I think the shock therapy erased those memories,” Cheek replied.

Cheek then looked around the room at Alamance Country Club and found current chairman of the county board Tom Manning.

“No offense Tom,” he said with a nod. “I like you.”

The entire exchange got more laughs from the crowd than standup comic Zach Galifianakis working a midnight club show.

Cheek and the town he now manages were the centers of attention at the breakfast, where the local economy and ways to improve it are usually discussed. Nearly all agreed Mebane is the place to be these days.

“David’s in good shape for a manager in a small city,” said Mac Williams, president of the Alamance County Chamber of Commerce. “What they have is unusual for a town of 15,000 people.’

Asked Friday for his thoughts about the recent session of the North Carolina General Assembly, David Cheek couldn’t muster much of an answer about a subject nearly everybody in the state has some kind of opinion about one way or the other.

Frankly, he hadn’t paid much attention so far.

“Six months into the job, Mebane is the center of the universe as far as I’m concerned,” Cheek said at the annual State of Alamance breakfast in Burlington.

Indeed, Cheek has been running things as Mebane’s city manager since the retirement earlier this year of Robert Wilson. Cheek served as an understudy to Wilson after a stint as an administrator for Alamance Community College. Prior to that, he had a bumpy eight-year carnival ride as Alamance County manager before resigning in 2005 to work for ACC — and took a pay cut to do it.

So he knows what current County Manager Craig Honeycutt is going through in his recent travails with county commissioners Bill Lashley and Tim Sutton.

Cheek, a member of the three-person State of Alamance panel, was pretty far removed from those turbulent days on Friday, even though the subject did come up when talks turned to education spending.

“WasI the county manager?” Cheek asked facetiously.

“Do you want to be?” someone on the panel asked in return with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

“I think the shock therapy erased those memories,” Cheek replied.

Cheek then looked around the room at Alamance Country Club and found current chairman of the county board Tom Manning.

“No offense Tom,” he said with a nod. “I like you.”

The entire exchange got more laughs from the crowd than standup comic Zach Galifianakis working a midnight club show.

Cheek and the town he now manages were the centers of attention at the breakfast, where the local economy and ways to improve it are usually discussed. Nearly all agreed Mebane is the place to be these days.

“David’s in good shape for a manager in a small city,” said Mac Williams, president of the Alamance County Chamber of Commerce. “What they have is unusual for a town of 15,000 people.’

What Mebane has is a lot of what others want these days. It has a housing market that remained steady and is now strengthening again. It has industrial development via Samet Corp. It has a burgeoning downtown, a growing population, access to two major interstates and a railroad, Tanger Outlets and a footprint in Orange County, which has a truckload of sales tax money to spend in, you guessed it, Mebane. And Mebane is connected to potentially the biggest economic deal in our area in more than a decade, the $100 million mystery distribution center known publicly as Project Swordfish.

“Here in little Mebane we have 2,000 apartments that are 99 percent full. Two more are in the briefs that are coming online,” Cheek said. “Look at Arrowhead. A year ago, there were four houses and a lot of white pipes sticking up out of the ground. Today there are over 25 houses there.

“There is a lot of government infrastructure in Mebane on the Orange County side,” Cheek continued. Orange County has risen from the ashes. They passed a sales tax there last year for economic development and they’re putting millions into water and sewer services for western Orange County.”

Cheek said that Orange County is getting serious about economic development and predicted that forest land in western Orange County wouldn’t look that way in 10 years. The quarter-cent sales tax yields $5 million a year for economic development.

“That failed (in Alamance County) but it failed the first time in Orange County, too. It’s how you market it,” Cheek said.

“It lost here 2 to 1,” Williams chipped in. “It was ugly.”

Cheek has his own theories.

“Orange and Alamance were once one county. Then the Revolutionary War happened and all the British went to Orange County and all the revolutionaries went to Alamance County,” he said.

Insert rim shot here.

All kidding aside, what Cheek said he does know is that the county’s retail sales have grown by 22 percent over the six years in which Alamance Crossing was built in Burlington and Tanger Outlets in Mebane, connected by “that big swath of asphalt running through the middle of it.” A lot of out-of-town shoppers are spending money here.

“Which makes it a bigger shame that we didn’t pass the sales tax,” Williams immediately added.

From his perch on the border, Cheek has a wide view. He sees differences not only in terms of economic development, but education.

“I don’t know what the dropout rate in Orange County is, but I can go to Cedar Ridge High School and see a big difference in the facilities there and in the facilities in Alamance County,” Cheek said.

Then he added: “I can say this because I’m no longer county manager.”

Madison Taylor is editor of the Times-News. Contact him by email at mtaylor@thetimesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @tnmadisontaylor.